BOOM
by D Squirrel
Summary: Vampire in the woods? Not so much. Part of the Change of Atmosphere universe. WARNINGS: Language, whumpin' on characters, death of a made up character in a particular gross and explosive way, excessive exclamation marks!, a smidge of Twilight bashing, and a pinch of violence.


_**WARNINGS:**_ Language, whumpin' on characters, death of a made up character in a particular gross and explosive way, excessive exclamation marks!, a smidge of Twilight bashing, and a pinch of violence.

Silence filled the woodland clearing for several long moments after the BOOM faded away until Aaron bounced out of cover with a whoop of excitement. "Did you see that? Oh my God that was _awesome_!" Bits of red spattered the back of his clothes. The front was coated in a mixture of dust, pine needles, and leaves from diving into the dirt at the last second.

"That was the most horrible thing I've ever seen," Hank shouted, and sat down on a fallen tree that was relatively clean of anything that had gone splat, "and then it blew up!"

A blob of unidentifiable visceral goo dripped off a tree limb and _plopped_ onto the pine needles.

Nick clutched his ringing head between his hands and didn't say anything. His arm hurt where the wesen had bit him and his back was a solid bar of pain from direct tree-to-body-contact. He wanted a vacation. Somewhere nice and tropical where Juliette would wear a bikini and the drinks all came in coconuts and there were absolutely no exploding Romanian tick-wesen running around the woods with capes and bad accents.

"I," Monroe began, loudly enough that Nick could just hear him through the hollow rushing in his ears, "am going to go home and take a shower!" He scraped at a bit of goo on his pant leg with a stick. "And then I'm going to take _another_ shower!"

"Why do you carry grenades?!" Hank shouted at Aaron when the big man bounced over in their general direction still glowing with post-detonation adrenaline and brushing down his shirt.

"What?!"

Hank made a pulling the pin and throwing motion.

"Oh! Because they won't let me use the high powered explosives off duty!" Aaron yelled, utterly serious.

Nick saw Hank open his mouth to say something and close it again. Twice. "That seems short sighted of them!" he said finally.

"Shower!" Monroe moaned, combing a bit of red, stringy _something_ out of his hair.

Nick flicked another piece off his shoulder, appreciating all over again how Monroe had tossed him to the ground and thrown himself on top as the grenade went off.

"At least it's dead!" Aaron said. He wasn't shouting as loudly and Nick could still hear him which he thought meant his hearing was recovering.

There had been a point where he hadn't been certain they were going to win this fight. He'd shot the _sânge __fraier_ with the crossbow. Hank had shot it with his gun. Monroe had slashed it with the machete he'd liberated from the trailer's weapons cabinet and then, when he'd lost hold of that, his claws. Aaron had wacked it into a tree with a limb as wide as Nick's forearm and then shot it with _his_ gun.

Nothing had fazed the pale, creepy little bastard. They'd been in dire circumstances until Aaron had ripped Nick free of the blood-sucking mouth and tossed him halfway across the clearing, directly into Monroe, who'd thankfully recovered enough from being flung away by the _sânge __fraier_ to catch him. Aaron had then stuffed a grenade into the wesen's pocket and run for it with a yelped, "FIRE IN THE HOLE!"

Nick peeled back his sleeve and stared at angry red puncture. "Do you suppose tetanus shots work for creepy vampire ticks?" Jesus it looked like he'd been jabbed with a screwdriver.

"Probably not!" Hank said tiredly. He gestured vaguely around the clearing. "Do you think we should bury it or…?"

"We're far enough out I don't think anyone will find the…uh, body before the animals get it!" Monroe said. "Hardly anyone goes hiking out here!"

The last two who'd ignored the road closed sign were the reason Portland's Grimm had gotten involved. They had escaped, bleeding and injured, with a crazy tale of a vampire in the woods. The description had sounded like a vampire at least. Pale, gaunt, lived in a cave, victim's drained of blood, eastern European accent. Cape. Okay, it was more like a poncho made out of a blanket but still—cape!

"True!" Aaron agreed loudly. "Officer Jameson said that even the forest rangers don't come out here!"

"Probably because of the giant freakin' tick-wesen living in the woods, eating people!" Hank yelled.

Nick held up a hand until Aaron took the hint and pulled him to his feet. He clung to the _jagerbar's_ arm for a moment, waiting for his balance to kick in.

"You okay?!"

"Just a little dizzy!" Either from the explosion, the impact with the tree, or the blood loss. Or all three.

Monroe let Aaron pull him to his feet with his other hand. "Hospital!"

"Rosalee!" Nick counteroffered. He'd gotten sneakier about hiding his extracurricular injuries from both IAB and the insurance company and this wasn't bad enough to require a hospital.

"She has a shower!" Monroe said, which sounded like agreement to Nick. Monroe helped Hank up and then supported him across the clearing.

It was a short walk to Nick's SUV, but a long, rough ride to the highway on what Nick was convinced were two deer trails that just happened to run parallel. "Next time," Nick complained as they bumped their way towards the main road, "Next time I want the creepy vampire wesen who lives in a nice house at the end of a wide, smooth road. And comes along quietly!"

Aaron, who had insisted on driving, grinned widely. "I like it! I don't get out of the city enough!"

"And it's obviously driven you crazy!" Monroe observed from the back seat. To Nick he added, "You want me to wrap up that arm? We're going to have to sterilize the hell out of it you know!"

"I'll get it!" He didn't want to think about sterilizing anything. Rosalee had some incredibly effective disinfectants but they weren't pleasant. He tugged the first aid kit out from under the seat, balancing it on his lap so he could flip the locking tabs one handed. He'd just gotten a gauze pad on the still oozing bite when his phone rang. Fumbling it out of his pocket he hit speaker and dropped it in the cup holder. "Hey, honey, what's up!" he said over the crinkle of emergency garbage bag seat covers. He'd learned to keep boxes of them in every vehicle for just such occasions.

"Was it a vampire?" Juliette asked. "More importantly do you owe Wu twenty bucks?"

He ripped open another roll of gauze with his teeth, shook it out, and began winding it around his arm. It was much tidier than he would have done two years ago. His first aid skills had gotten a lot of practice.

"It was not a vampire! At least not in the Dracula kind of way!"

"No sparkly Twilight wannabe vamp skipping through the forest then?" she laughed.

Nick was pretty sure everyone in the vehicle shuddered at the memory of what they'd found in the cave. He was never going to be able to listen to Juliette talk about taking ticks off her furry patients without twitching.

"Not even close!" Hank yelled from the back seat.

"Judging by the accent he _was_ from Romania or possibly Moldavia!" Monroe said, wedging his shoulders between the seats to talk to the phone directly. "This could be the wesen genus that inspired the original Count Dracula myth!"

"Wow, that's amazing," Juliette said. "Why are you all shouting?"

"We sort of had to blow him up," Nick explained, trying to lower his voice. It was difficult when his ears were alternately ringing and filled with hollow rushing.

"What was that, hon? Now you're muttering."

"I said we had to blow him up!"

"You had to blow him up," Juliette said flatly. She didn't sound all that surprised, which Nick supposed said a lot about their relationship. "So…not so much with the coming along quietly then?"

"Not so much."

"Hmmm…. You'll be home in time for dinner?"

"Don't mention food!" Monroe moaned from the back seat. "I'm never eating again!"

"Amen to that!" Hank agreed.

Aaron laughed. "I've _got_ to hang out with you guys more often! I forgot how _fun_ it is!"

The End

_**NOTES:**_ Inspired by real life events. Except without the explosives or killer wesen-tick (it was really very tiny), or the four hot guys (dammit), or…trees.


End file.
